Keyword – UK news
Trefwoorden – Brexit, European Union, UK news, England, Scotland, Wales, Devon, London, Northamptonshire, Politics
Title – ‘Absolute nightmare’: Brexit bellwether constituencies revisited 10 years on | Brexit | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/daniel-boffey,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/bethan-mckernan,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/sammy-gecsoyler,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/severincarrell
Link – ‘Absolute nightmare’: Brexit bellwether constituencies revisited 10 years on | Brexit | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T11:06:35.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/22/brexit-bellwether-constituencies-revisited-10-years-eu-referendum

T he Guardian has revisited five bellwether constituencies we reported on during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, and asked those we spoke to at the time how they now feel about Brexit a decade on from the vote.

Torridge and West Devon. Voted leave by 57.0%

“Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,” says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry.

Rutherford, who since 1979 has run a business in Appledore, north-west Devon, buying from fishers and selling on to wholesalers, even featured on a Ukip poster. “Nobody is listening. They might listen in June,” he said in 2016.

Now he says that Brexit has been a disaster from day one. Under Johnson’s deal, the UK fishing fleet with which Rutherford works achieved barely any increase in fishing opportunities, he says. “Sold down the river,” is how Rutherford puts it.

Then there were the huge additional export costs from 1 January 2021. He had “folders after folders” of information about what he needed to do ahead of time, but it all proved to be “useless”.

“I believe it was 4 January we shipped £47,000 worth of our first shipment of largely ray and dover sole,” he says. “The first thing you have to do is be VAT registered in France. You cannot export into France without that. You’ve got to employ a French accountant to do that for you. The cost of that is £2,000 a month. That first load was held up for five days.”

It was ruined. Under a compensation scheme set up by the government as the disaster unfolded, Rutherford got £11,000 back.

“That was our first encounter,” he says. “You have got other costs: you need a health certificate that costs £85 a go. You need a transport company to do the import documents: £245 a go. So every shipment is an extra £330.

“If you ship three times a week it is a thousand quid. There are other costs. Bearing in mind we are really a husband-and-wife team, it is £70,000 right out of my back pocket. It is horrendous.”

Then there is French customs. “On a health certificate, which is 16 sheets long, you have got eight sheets in English and eight sheets in French,” Rutherford says.

“If you miss one digit of a 10-digit code, your whole shipment is condemned the other side. Since Brexit we have lost about eight loads – anything from £15,000 to £50,000.”

He adds: “A lot of merchants in the south-west of England say: ‘I just can’t do it – it is not worth exporting.’ I’ll be exporting this Friday and I will have all the costs and all the worries until I get an email on Saturday saying customs cleared.” Does he regret his vote? “One hundred per cent – anybody would.” Daniel Boffey

Ceredigion. Voted remain by 54.6%

In 2016, the then Liberal Democrat MP for Ceredigion, Mark Williams, said he was very confident campaigning for remain in the referendum: a YouGov poll at the time suggested his former constituency was the most pro-EU area in the UK.

Not only was the area’s rural economy “heavily dependent” on EU funding, the universities in Aberystwyth and Lampeter meant “we have been an enriched, cosmopolitan community for a very long time”, he said 10 years ago .

Much has changed since. University of Wales , Lampeter has closed; the constituency is now part of Ceredigion Preseli, which includes parts of north Pembrokeshire; and Williams was replaced by Plaid Cymru’s Ben Lake in the 2017 general election.

“The tide had already turned against the remaining Liberal Democrats in office by then but I have no doubt that the Brexit result contributed to me losing my seat,” Williams says today.

He and Lake say the local agricultural sector has suffered from leaving the EU.

Lake says: “Our upland sheep farmers are more dependent on subsidies than arable farms. The funding cycles used to run in five- to seven-year cycles, and now two years is a luxury. Most lamb exports still go to the EU, but now farmers have to get health and sanitary certificates and checks.”

While remain won in Ceredigion, Wales as a whole – unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland – voted leave, possibly because of large numbers of retired English people living there.

Support for Plaid Cymru has soared since. The Welsh nationalist party had its best general election result in 2024, and now leads Wales after sweeping Labour from office in May’s historic Senedd election .

According to Lake, Brexit “drew attention to constitutional matters”.

“It’s obvious that the current setup with a heavily centralised government in Westminster doesn’t work for Wales … or north-east England or Cornwall for that matter,” he says. “Since Brexit people have realised that it is Plaid Cymru that will stand up for Wales.” Bethan McKernan

Banff and Buchan. Voted remain by 54.0%

In May 2016, David Milne, the chair of the Scottish White Fish Producers Association, leaned against an EU funding sign on the quayside of Fraserburgh harbour and said he hoped Brexit would allow his industry to “manage our own destiny”, but he now feels their livelihoods were “bartered away”.

For Milne, “control” was the main appeal of Brexit. “We are bitter about it because we haven’t gained any,” he now says.

“Near 99% of fishermen voted for Brexit because we wanted more control. We wanted to manage the quotas and effort and have more say as to what happened in our waters.

“We was promised that, but that hasn’t happened. So that’s the thing, it was just lies that was told to us again.”

Scottish fishers have continued to voluntarily close spawning grounds in Scottish waters to rejuvenate cod stocks. But Milne says EU boats now sail north to exploit those waters.

“We designed the areas where we knew the time of year the cod was spawning in them. These are things that was taken onboard ourselves, as fishermen, to manage the cod stocks.

“And now we’re seeing EU vessels from Holland coming all the way to Fair Isle and Shetlands to catch cod. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.”

Boundary changes in 2024 mean the constituency of Banff and Buchan no longer exists. Severin Carrell

Romford. Voted leave by 69.2%

A decade ago, Sue Connelly did not mince her words on Brexit. “We want our country back,” she said in the heat of the EU referendum campaign outside Margaret Thatcher House, the headquarters of Romford’s Conservative Association.

In the years since, the party’s fortunes locally have changed massively. At last month’s local elections, Reform UK took control of Havering council, where the east London town is situated, and completely wiped out the Tories in the process.

But some things have stayed the same. “Romford is very rightwing,” says Michael White, a former Conservative leader of Havering council.

Neither Connelly, who served as the constituency secretary, nor Osman Dervish, the former chair of the Conservative Association, who spoke to the Guardian in Romford during the 2016 campaign, responded to requests to reflect on the result a decade on.

White and Dilip Patel, the deputy leader of the Romford Conservative group, who also campaigned locally for the leave vote, now have “mixed feelings” about Brexit.

Patel says his choice was influenced by his role as a school governor where he could “see the pressure schools were under to accommodate children” who emigrated from Bulgaria and Romania after both countries joined the EU.

He also mentions pressures on the NHS and housing. “I felt that we needed to stop the influx of free movement until we got ourselves sorted,” he says.

White says he voted for Brexit because he “wanted policies for British people to be made in Britain and not in Brussels” and a hope that “the amount of money we were supposed to save could be better used on the NHS”.

But he is sceptical that the health service has seen any money promised as a benefit of Brexit. “In fact, the NHS has gotten worse,” says White.

Patel and White lost their seats as councillors to Reform UK last month, which they believe was partly influenced by Brexit. “I think it’s split the party,” White says.

They were both approached by Reform to switch party allegiances but declined, unlike some Tories. “Was I annoyed?” asks White. “Yes. Lots of people that I’ve counted as colleagues for a number of years decided to cross the floor.”

Among them was Andrew Rosindell, Romford’s MP for 25 years, who defected to the Farage-led party in January. The move has led to a bitter rift between the local Conservative Association and Rosindell, who was locked out of his constituency office located inside Margaret Thatcher House. He launched a high court action in an attempt to be let back in but lost. His name still appears on the door.

White says he was “saddened and disappointed” by Rosindell’s defection. “I’ve known Andrew since 1982 and we’ve been the best of friends. I think I was probably one of the first people he phoned to say he was defecting,” he says.

But party loyalty comes first and he is prepared to campaign against Rosindell. “It’s quite a perdition to go out there and campaign against somebody who’s been a friend for a long time but that’s what I need to do,” White says. “I‘m very unhappy I have to face that choice.” Sammy Gecsoyler

Kettering. Voted leave by 61.0%

Ten years ago, the then Conservative MP Philip Hollobone – resplendent in a union flag coat – predicted that places such as Rothwell, Northamptonshire , would have a critical say in Britain’s future.

“This is middle England,” he said at the time, as he led his pro-leave canvassers through the town. “This referendum is going to be decided in market towns like this.”

His side won the Brexit campaign – but Hollobone went on to lose his parliamentary seat in Kettering in 2024 to Labour. He believes this was a result of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK eating into his votes.

“The big Reform message in 2024 was real anger about immigration,” Hollobone says. The Conservatives failed to deliver on the promise of tightening migration when outside of the EU, he claims.

“The negotiations were handled really badly and the Brexit deal when it was achieved was suboptimal,” Hollobone says. “The tragedy is that over the last 10 years, the potential for Brexit has not been realised. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. But putting Brexit into practice hasn’t gone nearly as well as it should have done.

“That isn’t the fault of Brexit. That’s the fault of the politicians who are in charge of the process. The big letdown has been over immigration. We had the opportunity to really tighten up our immigration controls but in fact it went the other way.”

Hollobone supported Boris Johnson for Tory leader in 2019 after the fall of Theresa May’s government because of the dissatisfaction with her Brexit proposals. Johnson let him down, Hollobone says.

“Boris Johnson didn’t believe in the tough controls that many others did. Ukip stood down in the 2019 election believing Conservative promises that we would get tough on immigration. And when we didn’t, Reform took revenge in 2024.” Daniel Boffey

Keyword – Business
Trefwoorden – easyJet, Airline industry, Business, Mergers and acquisitions, US economy, Economics, Air transport, World news, UK news
Title – US firm goes public with £4.7bn proposal to buy easyJet after earlier bids rejected | easyJet | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/marksweney
Link – US firm goes public with £4.7bn proposal to buy easyJet after earlier bids rejected | easyJet | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T11:10:47.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jun/22/castlelake-public-proposal-buy-easyjet

The US investment firm trying to buy easyJet has gone public with its latest £4.7bn takeover proposal for the budget airline, its third and latest offer to be rejected.

Castlelake said on Monday that an all-cash offer of 625p a share, valuing easyJet at just over £4.7bn, had been rejected by the airline’s board on Sunday, after previous offers at 560p and 600p.

Castlelake said it had now decided to make the bid public so that easyJet shareholders could evaluate it before a takeover deadline on Friday.

“Castlelake expected that the third proposal would elicit prompt engagement from the easyJet board,” the company said. “Following the rejection of three proposals by the easyJet Board, and given its unwillingness to engage meaningfully, Castlelake is announcing this third proposal to enable easyJet shareholders to consider its merits and provide their views on the third proposal to the easyJet board.”

Under City takeover rules, Castlelake, which is headquartered in Minneapolis and manages $36bn (£27bn) in assets, has until 5pm on 26 June to announce whether it intends to make an offer for easyJet.

Castlelake also said it has partnered with two investors to meet EU regulations whereby European airlines must be majority-owned by investors within the region. This rule still applies to easyJet, even after Brexit.

The company said it had partnered with Peter Bellew, a former chief operating officer at Riyadh Air, easyJet and Ryanair, and the former chief executive of Malaysia Airlines. Bellew runs Dooks Capital, a seed investment and advisory firm focused on AI in aviation, which he founded last September and operates out of Saudi Arabia.

The second partner is Mark Breen, the chief executive of Dublin-based Oneiros Aerospace, whose previous experience includes working for Oman Air.

“The third proposal includes these EU national partners investing and participating in the proposed acquisition of the company through their ownership and control of an EU company,” said Castlelake. “This EU partner will hold a controlling shareholding in the overall structure. The EU partner will at all times be owned and controlled by EU nationals.

“This proposed structure is consistent with structures adopted by a number of other European airlines that are subject to the same EU ownership rules as the company. Castlelake is confident that this is a clear, deliverable solution to ensure compliance with all applicable regulatory requirements.”

Castlelake made its first approach earlier this month , saying it intended to make an offer of at least 403p, which valued easyJet at £3bn.

On Monday, easyJet said Castlelake is trying to buy the airline “on the cheap”, and said that its proposed ownership structure of the carrier is “opaque”.

“The board believes that the third proposal represents an opportunistic attempt to acquire easyJet ‘on the cheap’ and that it is therefore not in the best interests of easyJet shareholders,” the company said.

“The board of easyJet carefully considered the third proposal with its advisers and concluded that it is highly opportunistic, delivered against the backdrop of easyJet’s temporarily depressed share price, and still fundamentally undervalues easyJet and its prospects.

“The premium, multiple and future share price analyses presented by Castlelake are based primarily on Middle East conflict-affected share prices, short-term earnings and analyst reports.”

Should Castlelake’s bid be successful, it could prove an interesting return to easyJet for Bellew, after a chequered tenure as chief operating officer from 2019 to 2022. His initial appointment, after being poached from Ryanair, prompted legal action from the Irish carrier.

The following year, the easyJet pilots’ union passed an overwhelming vote of no confidence in Bellew owing to his handling of staff and layoffs during the Covid pandemic – which notoriously included addressing pilots with a motivational speech plagiarised from the Irish taoiseach . Bellew quit in 2022 after easyJet suffered weeks of operational issues and flight cancellations.

Before news of takeover interest emerged, shares in easyJet had lost about a fifth of their value since the start of the year.

The airline’s share price has risen by 40% over the past month amid prospects of a takeover. Shares were up 3.4% at 521p by early afternoon on Monday, making easyJet one of the top risers on the FTSE 250.

In October, reports emerged that the Swiss-headquartered shipping company MSC was considering a takeover of the business . In 2021, easyJet rejected an approach from the rival airline Wizz Air.

EasyJet, which is headquartered in Luton, England, and employs more than 16,000 people around the world, is one of Europe’s three biggest low-cost airlines, behind Ryanair, with Wizz Air in third place.

Castlelake is led by its executive chair and founder, Rory O’Neill. It entered talks in January with the bankrupt US carrier Spirit Airlines over a possible takeover.

Castlelake previously bailed out collapsed Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) and then sold on its shares to Air France-KLM.

Keyword – Wellness
Trefwoorden – Well actually, Fitness, Life and style
Title – Improved performance, freedom of movement and less pain: how to start a mobility practice | Well actually | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/madeleine-aggeler
Link – Improved performance, freedom of movement and less pain: how to start a mobility practice | Well actually | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T16:00:18.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jun/22/how-to-start-mobility-practice

Fitness is often measured through numbers: how much weight a person can lift, or how fast or far they can run. But one important metric is harder to quantify: mobility.

Mobility gets overlooked, because the relevant exercises do not “have the instant visual appeal of traditional workouts”, says Tyler McDonald, certified personal trainer and senior brand manager for the National Academy of Sports Medicine.

Mobility can’t be tracked on a leaderboard, and won’t significantly change how your body looks. But it will help you feel better and do better at just about everything else. As McDonald puts it: “It doesn’t matter how much you can bench-press if your shoulders hurt too much to put a carry-on bag in the overhead bin.”

So what is mobility and how does one start incorporating it into a fitness routine? We asked experts.

What is mobility?

Although “mobility” and “flexibility” are often used interchangeably, they don’t mean the same thing, says Dr Andrew Jagim, a sports medicine expert at the Mayo Clinic Health System.

Flexibility refers to the passive ability of a muscle or joint to move through a range of motion, Jagim explains. Mobility, on the other hand, is more active and incorporates strength, motor control, coordination and stability.

How deep you can sink into a forward fold, for example, is a matter of flexibility. But being able to move from a forward fold into a squat and back again requires mobility.

Why is mobility important?

“The biggest benefit of good mobility is freedom of movement,” says McDonald.

When your body moves in the way it is supposed to, the basic tasks of life feel easier – you can squat down to pick up keys you dropped, reach into the back seat of your car, or run around without your body feeling stiff and painful.

Movement requires a series of complex and overlapping systems in the body to work in sync: joints for bending, hinging and pivoting; muscles for moving the joints; and the brain and nervous system for balance and coordination.

Without good mobility, your body may still be able to accomplish daily tasks, but it will look for shortcuts, enlisting the help of joints and muscles that probably shouldn’t be involved.

“If your hips are locked up from sitting at a desk all day, your body still needs to find a way to let you bend over,” McDonald says. Often, it does so by “borrowing” some of that movement from your lower back. Over time, McDonald explains, this compensation can lead to chronic aches, premature joint wear, and a much higher risk of injury during sudden or heavy movements.

Being able to move efficiently is also essential to ageing independently, and fall risk is a major issue as people age. A 2023 paper in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that many elderly adults who fall are not injured, but must call emergency services for help because they lack the hip and knee mobility required to get up.

“Those left lying on the floor for over an hour, even without injury, are more likely to die within six months,” the paper read.

Even for those in the bloom of youth, for whom healthy ageing seems like a distant concern, mobility has lots of immediate benefits, including improved athletic performance, says Dr Kelly Starrett, physiotherapist and co-author of the book Built to Move.

“When we have tissues that are more compliant, joints that work better, more efficiency, better recovery, power goes up,” Starrett says. This allows an athlete with better mobility to work harder than their competition, because their body is moving more efficiently and not using energy on wasteful movement.

More from How to start:

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

How do you incorporate mobility exercises into your routine?

Sit on the ground. It’s as simple as it sounds: sit on the ground for 20-30 minutes a day. You can do it while you watch TV in the evening, and move between as few or as many positions as you want. “Sit side-saddle, hurdler, on your knees, cross-legged, it doesn’t matter,” Starrett says. Over time, what starts to happen is “we start to spend time in very fundamental shapes”, he says.

Try soft tissue work . Although not the same as regular mobility work, Starrett says that short sessions of compressing soft tissue (like muscles, tendons, fat and skin) can have huge benefits, including improved blood flow and a greater range of tissue movement.

To do this, place a foam roller or tennis ball on the floor, and simply … roll around on it for a while. Starrett suggests committing to 10 minutes a day.

“Ask yourself: What’s sore? What hurts? What feels stiff?” he says. Then roll on that area. As you do so, make sure you can breathe; if the sensation is too intense and you can’t breathe, back off a bit by putting less weight on the roller or ball. If that’s still too intense, you can also practice in a chair or against a wall.

Compression should be limited to soft tissue, meaning you shouldn’t roll directly on a joint, as this can cause the joint to overextend. Roll above or below the knee, for example, but not on the knee itself. If you have a torn muscle or broken bone, speak to a doctor before doing any soft tissue work.

Integrate “mobility snacks ”. “You don’t need to commit to an hour of painful contortions each day,” in order to improve your mobility, says McDonald. Instead, he suggests aiming for 10-15 minutes of mobility work three to four times a week. This can be done as a dynamic warm-up before a workout, or while winding down at night. He suggests prioritizing three foundational movements:

90/90 hip switches : Sit on the floor with the front leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out in front of you and calf perpendicular to you) and the back leg bent at a 90-degree angle (thigh out to the side, calf roughly parallel to you). Slowly rotate your knees to the opposite side without lifting your feet off the floor. “This is fantastic for opening tight hips,” McDonald says.

Cat-cow stretch . With your hands and knees on the ground, arch your back towards the ceiling, dropping your head between your arms. Then, slowly drop your back and raise your head and glutes towards the ceiling. This helps with spine mobility.

World’s greatest stretch. Yes, this stretch has quite the name, but for good reason. Start in a plank. Bring the right leg forward into a low lunge position. Stretch the right arm overhead towards the ceiling, twisting the upper body. Then, bring the right hand behind the head and attempt to touch the ground with the right elbow. “It hits your hips, hamstrings and upper back all at once, making it incredibly efficient,” says McDonald.

Keyword – The Filter
Trefwoorden – Graduation, Students, Family, Life and style
Title – ‘I’ll be able to take it with me wherever I live’: the best graduation gifts, chosen by graduates | Graduation | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rhiannon-evans
Link – ‘I’ll be able to take it with me wherever I live’: the best graduation gifts, chosen by graduates | Graduation | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T14:00:25.000Z
Category – Lifestyle
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/thefilter/2026/jun/19/best-graduation-gifts-uk

T here’s considerable pride to be taken from graduating, and it’s a moment friends and family are often eager to mark with a gift. But what presents best cement this major milestone? As leaving celebrations of all stripes approach, we asked recent graduates to tell us about what they loved receiving, from the sentimental to the practical.

“When I graduated from York, my parents treated me to a meal at a restaurant I’d had my eye on since starting my course,” says reader Toby Beer , a biology graduate. “It was a brilliant send-off to celebrate my time in Yorkshire.”

Alternatively, buy them a voucher for their favourite restaurant, or one that covers various restaurants, such as Squaremeal .

“I was given a Canon G7 X [digital camera] ,” says fashion graduate Kayleigh McKenna . “I had wanted a camera for as long as I could remember and was able to capture the whole day in gorgeous photos.”

A reusable point-and-shoot film camera is a more affordable option for an analogue-loving gen Zer. Kodak’s Ektar H35 is a half-frame model, so the recipient can get twice as many shots from each roll of film.

For Mia , who graduated with an early childhood education degree, a thoughtfully chosen piece of art made the perfect gift: “My parents gave me a painting by Kimi Zoet that features all of my favourite spots in the city where I went to university, along with the houses I lived in. I’ll be able to take it with me wherever I live in the future.” Or try Artfinder for original art from independent artists.

Poppy Park was thrilled to get a pair of gold hoop earrings from her mum: “Every time I wear them, I’m reminded of the hard work that got me through my degree,” she says. We love these from Monica Vinader.

Amy Klaire was given a Coach handbag : “It’s stylish and practical, symbolising a step into adulthood,” she says.

If leather goods are out of budget, a small sentimental gift can be just as nice: “My sister gave me a Jellycat egg wearing a mortarboard,” says sports coaching graduate Cerys Yardley-Turpin . A Star Wars fan in your life? We love this Grogu plush in a full graduation outfit .

Beyond the ceremony

Otherwise, say it with words. “I received cards from my friends and family – some were handmade – and I’ve kept them all,” says Rowan , a history of art graduate. These personalised cards featuring the city they’ve graduated from are a thoughtful option they can keep.

Or what about some homewares for post-grad life? Bethany Love got some “nice rose-shaped gin glasses”. We love these coupes from Our Place, or try platters for dinner parties , or even a posh Le Creuset utensil set .

You could also help continue their broader education: “Each time I use the Art Fund life membership given to me by my uncle – which is often – I remember our shared love of art,” says Julia Marlow .

Art Fund’s National Art Pass includes free entry to 250 museums, galleries and historic houses and 50% off some exhibitions, and is available for three months upwards.

For Sinead Campbell , a grownup leather wallet was the perfect gift from her parents. “I lost my wallet while studying abroad during my second year, and for the following year, tied my cards together with a hairband. When I graduated, my parents bought me a vintage leather wallet. It was a practical present, and also a mark of maturity, symbolising the potential for prosperity. I still carry it around with me every day. ”

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Sport, Football, World Cup, Aramco, Saudi Arabia and sport
Title – Aramco’s petrodollar backing of World Cup leaves stain of sportswashing | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – Oscar Berglund
Link – Aramco’s petrodollar backing of World Cup leaves stain of sportswashing | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T10:39:10.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/22/aramco-petrodollar-world-cup-football-sportswashing-the-hotspot

I f you have watched the World Cup, you may have seen the big signs announcing Aramco as the tournament’s “energy partner”. This Saudi Arabian fossil fuel company also happens to be the world’s single largest corporate polluter while Saudi Arabia has, for decades, been the greatest stumbling block in international climate change negotiations. Aramco’s sponsorship is one aspect of Fifa’s increasing sportswashing that has angered fans around the world.

This cosy relationship between modern football and the polluting industries has a long history that can be divided into three periods. First was when the game grew in British society as a tool to order and discipline workers and then became a cultural export of the British empire and capitalism. In the Factory Act of 1850, workers won the right to have Saturday afternoons free from work from 2pm, which is why the traditional kick-off is 3pm.

European industrialism, militarism and colonialism further exported football across the globe and industrialisation in Britain helped create the conditions for competitions, with their need for order, discipline and structure. Football spread from England and Scotland to the industrial areas of north-east France, north-west Germany and around the ports of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Then came the postwar period when football was professionalised and increasingly dominated by clubs in the industrial cities. These clubs were often closely linked to the car industry, with the most evident examples being Juventus’s links with Fiat and Wolfsburg’s with Volkswagen. The economic regulations that governed football made elite men’s football a lot more spread out than it is today.

At European level, after the early dominance of Real Madrid, Milan, Inter and Benfica, there was a period of “Eurosclerosis” with a decline in playing standards and the finals of the European Cup being contested between smaller clubs from smaller cities with less global appeal, such as Malmö.

This relative equality was challenging to the big clubs and they started to push for changes to the competition and for more power within their leagues, especially in England, Italy and Spain.

Finally, with the establishment of the Champions League and the Premier League in the early 1990s, football became increasingly globalised. This opened up the sport to new forms of fossil capital investments, often in favour of the biggest clubs in the most attractive cities.

The 1990s had nine European club champions from nine cities, but only three clubs have won the Champions League who were not part of the 14 elite clubs that pushed for its expansion in the late 1990s. Those three all entered the elite level with the help of petrodollar investments: Chelsea with Roman Abramovich, Manchester City with Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates royal family and Paris Saint-Germain with Qatar Sports Investments, a subsidiary of the Qatari government. Meanwhile, for those who fail to compete, bankruptcy has become much more common .

There is now only one way for a club to enter the elite level of men’s football in Europe and that is investment from a petrostate, further locking in the carbon intensity of the sport and embedding fossil fuels as a crucial part of the biggest culture in the world. Fossil capital remains strong, despite most people now understanding that fossil fuels drive climate change and are a threat to civilisation.

So in order to justify delaying a green transition, fossil fuel companies need them to become a necessary evil, so embedded that we can not imagine life, let alone an enjoyable life, without them. This is where sportswashing comes into the picture and where football – and Fifa – play a very important role.

For every petrostate or oil magnate that buys a football club, for every event or club sponsored by a fossil-fuel company and for every airline logo on the shirt of our favourite players, the dominance of fossil capital becomes that little bit more embedded and makes it harder to imagine the game, and the world, without it.

So, as we love our beautiful game, we come to accept the necessary evil of fossil capital to keep it alive and flourishing. Aramco has bought into the World Cup in order to sell us the idea that we have no choice but to continue to burn fossil fuels. Don’t buy it.

Oscar Berglund is a senior lecturer in international public and social policy at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the report Football and climate change: A preview of the 2026 Fifa World Cup

This is an extract from our newsletter, The Hotspot. To subscribe just visit this page and follow the instructions.

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Cape Verde
Title – Cape Verdeans what are your thoughts on Cape Verde’s World Cup 2026 performance so far? | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/guardian-community-team
Link – Cape Verdeans what are your thoughts on Cape Verde’s World Cup 2026 performance so far? | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T10:23:06.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/22/cape-verdeans-thoughts-world-cup-2026-performance-so-far

Cape Verde is enjoying a fairytale World Cup , with their performance becoming the story of the tournament.

There was the shock 0-0 draw with Spain in their tournament debut. Then on Sunday, there was another when they drew 2-2 with two-time champions Uruguay in Miami. This now puts them in serious contention for a place in the knockouts.

We would like to hear from Cape Verdeans in the UK and across the globe. What are your thoughts on your nation’s performance so far in the World Cup? Have you been celebrating their progress? Where will you be watching Cape Verde’s next match against Saudi Arabia on Saturday?

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Fighting games, Sports games, Culture, MMA
Title – UFC 6 review: a bloody, brilliant MMA fighting game | Games | The Guardian
Author – Kirk McKeand
Link – UFC 6 review: a bloody, brilliant MMA fighting game | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T09:00:28.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jun/17/ufc-6-review-mma-fighting-game-ea-sports

B ecoming a professional fighter takes years of repetition, drilling techniques and training footwork until everything is instinctual. Your body needs an automatic answer for every limb, from every angle. In MMA , which encompasses every martial art, it’s even harder.

EA Sports’ UFC 6 realistically captures the grind of this brutal discipline. Throw on Career Mode and you spend most of your time working on combos and techniques. It’s all about making the complex controls feel second nature, increasing the effectiveness of every strike thrown by your fighter. With simulated six-week-long training camps between bouts, you can sometimes spar 12 times before a fight that could be over in a matter of seconds.

It’s an authentic fighter experience. In real life, these athletes spend relatively little time actually trying to take each other’s heads off with a shin, and most of their time training. In a game, however, it’s a bit of a slog. Once you’ve proven that you can ace these drills you can skip them, but you get fewer benefits. And it’s still laborious, as is tending to your inevitable injuries.

Happily, the fighting itself is excellent. UFC games have had a bit of a rock-’em’-sock-’em quality to them, but this latest instalment does a great job at creating more natural animations, flowing beautifully between the different levels submissions, wrestling, and stand-up — of an MMA fight. It looks almost worryingly realistic, too. From the pores on their skin to the wrinkles on the soles of their feet, these character models are the most detailed I’ve seen in a sports fighter, as impressive as Fight Night was when we saw HD video games for the first time. You can even tell who’s a standup fighter and who’s a wrestler by who has the most disfigured ears.

Every fight takes its toll on their bodies, too, with bruises and cuts appearing in direct response to your strikes. Blood droplets fly through the air and stain the canvas. When you land a knockout punch, the slow motion replay cranks up the volume so you hear the crunch of bone on bone and see cheeks wobble like a basset hound barking at a hairdryer.

A welcome new addition is The Legacy, a story mode that mythologises the rise of an up and coming fictional wrestler who’s trying to escape the shadow of his famous father, while brewing up a rivalry with another prospect at the same gym. It’s fully acted-out melodrama, your very own Rocky story, shining a light on how violence occasionally spills outside the Octagon and stains careers; inbetween fights, you attend press conferences and respond to provocations on social media.

The story does a great job of pulling you along for the first few hours as you go from rivals to friends and back to rivals again. It gets you invested in the action and raises the stakes, but the narrative climaxes near the beginning of your UFC career and then fizzles out. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity to keep you engaged when you reach the top and have to defend your belts. Nonetheless, between the fluid fighting and the story-mode razzmatazz, this is the best version yet of EA’s fight-sim series.

UFC 6 is out now; £69.99

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Horror films, Culture, World news, Sexuality
Title – Shadows of Willow Cabin review – secrets fester beneath horny hookup in low budget horror | Film | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/philhoad
Link – Shadows of Willow Cabin review – secrets fester beneath horny hookup in low budget horror | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T08:00:50.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/22/shadows-of-willow-cabin-review

T he best elevated horror makes a metaphor out of its writhing emotional subtext, but writer-director Joe Fria sadly can’t make the leap in this low-budget debut that undoubtedly has issues on its mind: repressed homosexuality, compulsive hookups and generational trauma. For much of the film the horror elements abruptly waylay what is otherwise a fraught two-handed gay drama.

After meeting on the apps, middle-aged English teacher Albert (Bryan Bellomo) and lithe paramedic Devon (John Brodsky) are finally getting cosy at Willow Cabin – the former’s childhood summer getaway, named for a line in Twelfth Night. But secrets fester beneath this ostensibly horny hookup. In Albert’s case, he has a wife and son – and this spot, which once belonged to his uncle, is where he first explored the other side of his sexuality, with his cousin. As for Devon, Albert is the latest in a long line of unfulfilling liaisons with married men, thanks to the emotional damage inflicted by his abusive dad. While both of them are candid to a point, the sporadic phantom eruptions inside the cabin suggest they’ve not got everything out of their systems.

Painstakingly seeping out in 114 minutes full of circuitous and sometimes cheesy dialogue, Shadows of Willow Cabin if nothing else feels highly personal. But Fria takes too long to move beyond pantomime gothic and find a deeper rooting for what verges on a compelling saga of familial shame and damage. And the claustrophobic bounds undeniably wring visual inventiveness out of Fria: he lights interiors to match the mood, giving them a pallid wash as the atmosphere sours. And on a couple of occasions, he breaks out the revolving shot Alfonso Cuarón used in Roma and lets the sound outside the shack do its work.

While Brodsky’s outbursts belong with the film’s erratic fright-night side, beyond the cultured exterior Bellomo has a pugnacious set to his jaw that lends substance to this would-be primer in escaping the binds of the past. A pity then that Fria couldn’t fully manifest his themes in a killer conceit – though a closet monster probably would have been pushing it.

Shadows of Willow Cabin is on digital platforms from 29 June.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Netherlands, Amsterdam, Europe weather, Europe, Climate crisis, Environment
Title – From mobile jungles to shadow art: how Dutch people try to beat the heat | Netherlands | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/senay-boztas
Link – From mobile jungles to shadow art: how Dutch people try to beat the heat | Netherlands | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T04:00:50.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/22/from-mobile-jungles-to-shadow-art-how-dutch-people-try-to-beat-the-heat

H ouseholds in Amsterdam are being urged to hang their curtains outside their windows as health experts recommend simple hacks to moderate the heatwave rolling across the Netherlands , where homes were built for old-fashioned damp and coldish northern European weather.

In a viral social media post last week, Eline Coolen, the heat coordinator at the city’s public health institute, urged sweaty city-dwellers to rig up temporary curtain rails or drape curtains or sheets outside to stop the sun’s rays reaching their large windows.

The government, meanwhile, has activated a national heatwave plan , with advice on caring for elderly and vulnerable people, and researchers are trialling everything from fake trees to shadow art to cool down pavements and pedestrians.

“In Dutch houses, but also in many houses in northern Europe , you have very big windows,” said Coolen. “We have always built for the winter, when you want as much sun and warmth in your house as possible.

“But every year in Amsterdam alone, 110 people die because of the heat – and that could rise to as many as 600 in the future without serious measures.”

Inspired by the sheets that appear draped over windows in Amsterdam-Noord, where she lives, and a recent trip to Barcelona where people mounted blinds on their balconies, she urged people online to make DIY adjustments – because if you can stop the sun touching your windows, there will be less heat transfer into your house.

It’s a matter of physics, according to Bert Blocken, a professor of mechanical engineering at Heriot-Watt University, who believes in alternatives to energy-guzzling air conditioning.

“Most of the time we spend indoors, even on very beautiful, sunny days, because we’re working or we’re sleeping, when we also recover from heatwaves,” he said.

“We need to keep our buildings cool, ideally without active cooling devices. The climate adaptation of individual buildings is important but still today, many are built with large, glazed facades that generate a lot of heat.”

A huge body of research showed the best way to keep a building cool was simply to keep out the sun, he said. If architects considered a textile striped canopy ugly, there were modern, retractable outdoor blinds.

“The ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans did this tens of centuries ago, but sometimes we’re very good at forgetting lessons from the past,” Blocken said. “If I were mayor, my first executive order would be to apply exterior solar shading on all buildings.”

There are three levels of action, according to RIVM, the Netherlands’ national public health institute: behaviour, housing and urban design. Werner Hagens, coordinator of the Dutch heatwave plan, said new research had shown that simple awareness campaigns appeared to reduce deaths during heatwaves .

“You can make changes in the area, more green spaces, you can make changes in the building, like screens and maybe other cooling mechanisms, but you can also give perspectives on how people inside them can minimise heat,” he said. “These temperatures can form a risk for people in vulnerable health … and it reduces the risks.”

A study by the homeowner association Vereniging Eigen Huis found that 23% of people surveyed felt their homes were too hot in a heatwave, although four in five had tried to do what they could to cool them down.

Blocken said that while building owners could whitewash flat roofs and invest in outside blinds, greenery was key: not only green roofs and facades, but large parks, trees and green spaces.

Fake trees, pergolas covered with greenery and mobile “jungle blocks” can all help pedestrians stay cool and even slightly moderate temperatures , according to Jeroen Kluck, a professor of climate resilient cities at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

“There’s always a reason not to do it: there’s limited public space, there’s no more money,” he said. “But it makes the city more attractive, liveble on hot days and it increases biodiversity. If you make shadow, with a nice place to sit underneath and plants that can survive a bit of drought, it all helps.”

Sandra Phlippen, an economist and head of climate strategy at ABN Amro, said it made economic sense for local governments and businesses to invest. “One night of sleep loss [costs] close to €200 [£173],” she said.

“Imagine a street where there are 100 people living, everybody sleeps terribly for three nights because of a heatwave and the next day they’re unproductive. That’s your investment in trees for the whole year.”

Keyword – News
Trefwoorden – Toy Story 5, Animation in film, Pixar, Technology, Film, Culture, Children, Society, Walt Disney Company
Title – To the tablet and beyond: does Toy Story 5 go hard enough on technology? | Toy Story 5 | The Guardian
Author – Jesse Hassenger
Link – To the tablet and beyond: does Toy Story 5 go hard enough on technology? | Toy Story 5 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T05:00:21.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/21/toy-story-5-go-hard-enough-on-technology

For more than 30 years, Pixar’s signature Toy Story series has been entertaining children while giving voice to their parents’ anxieties. This is especially pronounced in the film’s sequels, as the living toys who dedicate their lives to the happiness of their owner/child experience all different sorts of potential and parent-paralleled obsolescence, from physical wear-and-tear and a child reaching young adulthood to the toy equivalent of empty-nesting (still hanging around the playroom but no longer anyone’s favourite). It’s only natural – maybe even a little belated – that Toy Story 5 would address the encroachment of technology, which continues to make its way to children earlier and earlier. So many years after the tech breakthroughs that allowed Toy Story to become the first computer-animated feature, and Pixar to become a household name in family entertainment, has the formerly Steve Jobs-owned company turned against the kind of innovation that built its success?

The movie arrives at a conspicuous juncture in the sometimes-uneasy relationship between humans, their children and their tech. According to Pew Research , the majority of kids under 12 are using tablets and/or smartphones, even as links between screen time and mental health difficulties continue to be studied. More school districts in the US are tightening rules on devices. Parenting in 2026 involves making a series of difficult, imperfect decisions about how to further regulate screen time. It’s only natural that Toy Story 5 would reflect this, even if it’s not entirely clear when the movie itself is taking place. (The human characters have clearly not aged seven full years since 2019’s Toy Story 4.)

For the non-human characters in the movie, tech – personified by a child-friendly “Lilypad” tablet nicknamed Lily – threatens to supplant their role as a child’s go-to plaything. This is a particularly traumatic experience for Jessie (Joan Cusack), the seemingly inanimate, secretly soulful favourite toy of eight-year-old Bonnie. Bonnie is lured in by Lily’s simple but transfixing games, and real-world parents are invited to share Jessie’s panic and dismay that children Bonnie’s age are more likely to stare at screens than imagine their own adventures to project upon the vessels of more traditional playthings. Of course, whatever its creative virtues, Toy Story 5 will also become content for those young eyes. After a run in theaters, it will be distributed on Disney+, a popular streaming app available on tablets everywhere.

Whether because of their tech roots or the trademark nuance they bring to these issues (most likely both), the film-makers behind Toy Story 5 haven’t created an anti-tech screed. One band of landfill-clogging capitalism-enabled plastic toys – nostalgic and adorable though they may be – is not necessarily positioned as morally superior to a more complicated yet also more practical configuration of the same non-biodegradable polymers. The differences (or lack thereof) are underlined when Jessie meets and eventually befriends some outdated devices who share her understandable neuroses about being discarded. What are these iterations of tech if not their own form of toys, ready for humans to project their own wants and needs on to them before facing eventual discarding?

Indeed, while the new tablet is shown to have a hypnotising, even deadening effect on Bonnie, its most nefarious emotional results are human-generated. Bonnie’s parents buy her a tablet because of its social utility; she is having trouble making friends, and not only do many children her age have tablets, it also functions as a nascent social media. It does not bring her on to an open internet full of randos and creeps and their horrible posts (which is a whole other set of dangers the movie does not get into), but the film does depict it as a medium ready-made for bullying, even if a user’s group chat is limited to other children from their dance class. At the same time, tech does play a role in a complicated effort to make Bonnie a more compatible IRL friend, even if their bond pointedly involves continuing imaginary and toy-based play, rather than everyone sequestering themselves on their respective devices, as seen during an ill-fated sleepover earlier in the film.

This is all thoughtful and fair-minded; anyone expecting the middle-aged Pixar brain trust to produce an addled grownup screed against children and their damn tech – while extolling the virtues of their beloved fake plastic icons of yesteryear – will be pleasantly surprised. Pleasant surprises are typical of the Pixar storytelling style – grab the viewers with a great hook (the toys versus their new nemesis, the screens) and then deepen the story they thought they were getting until it is about something else (the positive impact parents hope to make on their children’s lives, even when it may be fleeting). That was true, too, of Pixar’s previous film Hoppers , from earlier this year. It starts off about a teenage girl’s attempts to save a local pond ecosystem, and winds up as a race to prevent all-out war between animals and humanity.

The problem with this approach of late – especially in Hoppers but also present in Toy Story 5 – is that these nuances start to feel mathematically, rather than emotionally, derived. Pixar film-makers are directors and writers and designers, yes, but there’s also an engineering side to their work that seems to love the big swings of inventive technology while resisting same-scaled gestures for their characters. Hence Jessie can’t rebel too hard against tech (or at least cannot have that rebellion fully validated), and Mabel, the budding activist from Hoppers, must remain in a friendly tug-of-war with developers and local politicians, rather than fully rebuking them. Some of these story turns play less like acts of radical empathy than a form of pointy-headed both-sides-ing.

To a degree, these are just the basic building blocks of good mainstream drama – unlikely allegiances, lead characters whose assumptions are challenged, seeming villains who gain nuance with further exploration. But it is precisely the would-be value-neutral conditions of modern tech that makes it so insidious in a child’s hands. To make the addictive quality of bad touchscreen games secondary to havoc wreaked by bad friends, especially when that havoc is entirely enabled by tech, seems like an optimistic view, especially in an era where deepfakes lead to disinformation and AI exhausts water supplies because tech guys insist the tech requires immediate acquiescence from humanity.

Toy Story 5 isn’t exactly suffused with move-fast-and-break-things tech-bro cheerleading. The film wittily acknowledges both the haplessness of many parenting decisions – Bonnie’s parents admit that getting their child a tablet may be a bad idea, and essentially offer their own shruggy emoticon, unsure of what else to try – and the fact that screen fixations know no demographic limitations. (At one point, there is an offhand gag about a grown adult spending minutes on end fussing with his virtual-meeting backgrounds, amusing himself and likely no one else.) In that sense, it’s true to modern parenting: I regret letting my child look at YouTube too early, and I also look at my phone too often. We do what we can to mitigate these hard-to-erase bad decisions and move forward.

Yet, on a bigger-picture level, there is not much satisfaction in a movie about how tech does not have to be that dangerous, and can even be pretty endearing, just so long as parents are just the right combination of ambivalent, flawed and oblivious, yet emotionally available in others. The movie seems to sense this discomfort: its big emotional wallop doesn’t have much to do with tech, but rather the same insecurities Jessie has felt since Toy Story 2. The tech may change, the movie implies, but the fundamentals of guiding a child and imprinting your best moments into their memories remains universal.

That may be wishful thinking. Part of the nefariousness of tech is the way it introduces new guiding forces into a child’s life, unbidden and often unqualified. It may not be the purview of Toy Story 5 (or Toy Story 6) to tell a story about Bonnie taking advice from YouTubers spewing nonsense, or training herself away from reading and toward short-form video, or relying on chatbots to perform simple tests incorrectly. But as much as Pixar acknowledges that toys may not have a future, their faith in the partnership between humans and tech may belong in the past.